Roll out more ROI from your videos

You would have to be shut off from all means of communication not to notice the meteoric rise in the use of online videos. Today, video is used for virtually everything from marketing and entertainment to education and training.

According to Comscore, in September 2013 alone, 189 million people in the U.S. watched 46 billion — that’s with a “b”— online videos.

What’s more, people don’t simply watch. They respond. Research overwhelmingly shows that online videos drive clicks and sales more effectively than text and image displays. In fact, a study done by the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business reveals that after watching a video, consumers were 72 percent more likely to buy.

No wonder eMarketer reported that it was the fastest growing ad format last year.

Of course, videos are generally more expensive to produce than most other media. After concepting, scripting, directing, editing, and props, the cost for a professional two-to-three-minute corporate video can start around $10,000. Add in other variables like shooting at multiple locations, hiring talent and producing on-screen animations, and the cost can easily rise from there.      

However, in today’s world of tighter-than-tight, highly scrutinized operating budgets, marketers have simply got to squeeze as much ROI as they can from every marketing dollar they spend. Videos included.

Video is not an “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” medium. You can’t film a great video, post it on your YouTube channel or website and drive one-time traffic to it. The ROI simply won’t be there.

Instead, marketers must maximize the share-ability factor. How? By leveraging all distribution methods. For financial services marketers, one of the easiest ways to do this is to tap into their own producer networks.

Because producers want to build their brand, they’re hungry for content they can share with their followers, prospects and clients. Give them a “hot” format like video, and allow them to easily co-brand it and share it, and you can succeed at engaging them . . . and, at the same time, extending your own organization’s brand message and reach . . . many times over.

At our agency, we use a video customizer from SaaS provider, Branding Central. It’s a web-based tool that helps our clients seize the opportunity with video and allow their distribution partners to quickly and easily:

• co-brand a video with their own name, agency info, and logo

• personalize a video using a photo or special message—without incurring any additional video production costs

• share a video online by embedding it in a website or creating a landing a page for it, and  

• distribute a video via email or by uploading and posting it on all social media channels.

For one of our insurance clients, this approach resulted in 7,500 agents creating approximately 4,500 new landing pages as well as embedding 3,000 videos into an existing website which together generated . . .  1.4 million online views for a single video.

Factor in the potential for these 7,500 agents to post that same co-branded video on their Facebook pages . . . and share it with their own network of followers, fans and clients. Easy to see that there would be an exponential increase in extending brand reach . . . not just for their own agency brand, but for this insurer’s brand as well.

Of course, this approach doesn’t simply extend brand reach. It does so at no added distribution cost. That’s because you only pay once to create a video and access the tool to customize it, so the ROI can far exceed the ROI you can get from paid media. For instance, when one insurer’s video was posted on YouTube, it got more than 4,800 views. But when it was served up to distribution partners to co-brand and share online, it was viewed more than 650,000 times…ORGANICALLY, which means our client didn’t have to pay extra to get its message out.

Can’t deny helping your producer network to up the share-ability for videos is where it’s at for increasing ROI.

Only question is . . . are you ready to roll?

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